Long-time Ethereum advocate William Mougayar is to be the curator and editor of the Ethereum Market Research Center (EMRC), a community-led initiative aimed at raising the profile of the blockchain’s ecosystem among institutional and professional audiences.
EMRC will feature contributions from prominent builders, researchers and analysts across the Ethereum landscape. It will include original research authored by EMRC contributors, curated material by external sources, thought-leadership pieces and a real-time news feed.
Ethereum comprises a large and innovative ecosystem that plays host to the major stablecoin market share, the proliferation of real-world assets (RWAs) and most of the total value locked in decentralized finance (DeFi). But many argue this has not been reflected in the price of the ether ETH token. That’s partly because rival blockchains have been more organized and systematic about getting their message across, Mougayar said.
“Ethereum is No. 1 when it comes to market share, but we realize it has not been communicating its messages as well as it should,” Mougayar said in an interview. “Meanwhile, Solana has been very aggressive from a marketing perspective.”
The new research hub aims to take on some of the educational burden not suited to the developer-focused Ethereum Foundation, and simply to “re-energize the Ethereum message,” Mougayar said. The move is part of a wider drive to push Ethereum into its next institutional phase, while will involve multiple firms and individual leaders, he added.
The idea that many competing layer-2 blockchains running on top of Ethereum and offering cheaper and faster transactions has somehow cannibalized the mother chain is more of a misplaced perception than an actual issue, Mougayar said.
“Ethereum is really the L2s and the L1 working together,” Mougayar said. “By the end of the year, there will probably be 200 L2s. So it’s about a whole ecosystem and not about a contest of features. Ethereum is very decentralized and it’s going to continue to grow laterally, just like the internet.”
Wholehearted decentralization, something lacking in other blockchain ecosystems, Mougayar points out, does make things like messaging tricky for Ethereum.
“The problem with a decentralized system is that everything is all over the place and in some ways that can be a weakness,” Mougayar said. “So the way to remedy this weakness is to recentralize some of this. So at some point in time, you have to recentralize the decentralized mass so you can see it, so it can be easier for people to see it all in one place.”